Furthermore, you get the best idea of height here, because the long amphitheatre of mountains is seen steadily growing in stature toward the great central group; and comparison is, by all odds, the best of teachers for the eye.
If for no other reason than the respect due to age, Jefferson deserves a moment to itself. It was granted, October 3d, 1765, to John Goffe, under the name of Dartmouth. The road diverging here, and crossing Cherry Mountain to Fabyan’s, is the oldest, as it long was the only highway through the White Mountains. In those early times the travelled way was by the Connecticut River and Lancaster through this valley to the White Mountain Notch. The divergent road is the old turnpike between Vermont and Portland. Gradually, as settlements were pushed farther and farther up the Ammonoosuc, a way was made by Bath, Lisbon, Littleton, and Dalton, to Lancaster; but to pass beyond it was still necessary to follow the old route; nor was it until after the settlement of Bethlehem cleared the way that an execrable horse-path was made over the present great highway up the Ammonoosuc. In 1803 President Dwight passed over this new road on his second excursion to the great Notch. Few travellers would now be willing to undergo what he did to see the mountains. There were then only three or four houses in the sixteen miles between Bethlehem and the Notch.
One of the first settlers of Jefferson was Colonel Joseph Whipple, mentioned in the narrative of Nancy, the ill-starred mountain-maid, who died while following her faithless lover in his flight from Jefferson out of the mountains. Colonel Whipple lived on the road to Cherry Mountain, near the mill. In 1797 his was the only house on the road. During the Revolution a party of Indians, led by a white man, surrounded the house, and made Whipple their prisoner. Inventing some pretext, the colonel obtained leave to go into another room, from which he made his escape by a window and fled to the woods, where he successfully eluded pursuit.
Finding myself already well advanced toward the summit of Starr King, I finished the ascent of this mountain during an afternoon’s stroll. Nothing worthy of remark, except the exquisite view from the summit, presented itself. Here I met again a throng of old acquaintances, and encountered a crowd of new ones. Here I saw something like a shadow darken the side of Mount Washington, and watched it creep steadily up and up to the summit. The shadow was the smoke of the locomotive making its last ascent for the day, under the eyes of thousands of spectators, who look at it to turn away with a smile, a shrug, or a shake of the head.
The name of Starr King has become a household word with all travellers in the White Mountains. It was most fitting that he who interpreted Nature so well and so truly should receive his monument at her hands. To him the mountains were emblematic of her highest perfection. He loved them. His tone when speaking of them is always tender and caressing. They appealed to his rare and exquisite perception of the beautiful, to his fine and sensitive nature, capable of detecting intuitively what was hid from common eyes. He felt their presence to be ennobling and uplifting. He opened for us the charmed portal. We accompanied him through an earthly paradise then first revealed to us by the fervor and wealth of his description. He led us to the shadiest retreats, the coolest groves, the most secluded glens. He guided our footsteps up the steep mountain-side to the bleak summit. Thrice fitting was it that a mountain should perpetuate the name of Thomas Starr King. As was said at the grave of Gautier, he too dated “from the creation of the beautiful.”
I have now rested four days at Ethan Crawford’s, who lives on the side of Boy Mountain, five miles east of Jefferson Hill, on the road to Gorham. This Ethan is a son of the celebrated guide and host so well known to former travellers by the sobriquet of Keeper of the Mountains.
I go to the window, and facing toward the setting sun look down the broadening valley of Israel’s River, over the glistening house-tops of Whitefield, into and beyond the Connecticut Valley. I have Mitten Mountain and Cherry Mountain, both heavily wooded, just over the way, although the view of these elevations is in part intercepted by a nearer mountain, also covered with a vigorous forest. At this moment I hear the rush of the stream far down in the Hollow; and, following the serpentine line its dark course makes among the press of hills, am confronted by the massive slopes of Madison and Adams, the sombre ravine and castled crags of Jefferson, and the hoary crest of Washington. I am really in the heart of the mountains.
Swiftly from these mountains descend, with exquisite grace, enormous billows of deep sea-green, which do not subside but lift themselves proudly at the foot of those great overhanging walls of olive and malachite. Here rolling together, their foliage, bright or dark, repeats the effect of flaws sweeping over a sunny sea. Their deep hollows, arching sides, and limpid crests perfect the resemblance to the moment when, having exerted its utmost energy, the panting ocean stands exhausted and motionless in the grasp of the north wind.
These lower mountains, interposing a barrier between the two valleys of the Ammonoosuc and of Israel’s River, seem, you think, pushed up from the yielding earth simply by the enormous weight of the higher and neighboring mountains whose keen summit-lines cut New England in halves. At this hour these lines are edged with dull gold. All along the wavering heights I can detect with the naked eye isolated black crags, and can plainly see the deep dents in the broken cornices and capitals of the grand old mountains—those vestiges of their primordial architecture. Here the inclined ridge of the plateau, connecting the pinnacle of Washington with the peaks of Monroe, is traced along its whole extent. At this distance its craggy outline breaks in light ripples, announcing nothing of that wilderness of stones assailing the climber. All the asperities are softened into capricious harmonies. Below yawn the ravines.